Paul Flynn: Can we define the difference between Bill Gates's suggestion for the near future and what the Government suggest? Bill Gates's suggestion is for a link between the biometric information and one single care, which is a relatively simple matter. However, the Government suggest that there should be a differentiation between the information on one biometric identifier and many millions of others. The process that has been suggested by the Government is many millions of times more complicated and more expensive than what Bill Gates suggests. Can my right hon. Friend give us some information on that?

Charles Clarke: The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the passport agency, which has done precisely that. It is a ridiculous state of affairs for the right hon. Gentleman to assert that no Government can ever organise an IT project in the interests of the country. I am perfectly well aware that there are major issues in both the public and private sectors about major IT projects. As somebody originally from the private sector, the right hon. Gentleman will know that that is the case and he is right to say, in terms of his first question, that we should have a proper contractually-based tendering process, which is precisely what we have.

Emily Thornberry: Does my hon. Friend not agree that, if someone from another country comes here and it is found through the great good sense of a district judge that the person may be guilty of war crimes, it is our duty as a nation to prosecute them properly and that, in considering whether the law should be changed, we should weigh in the balance very heavily the great good sense and experience of district judges?

Helen Jones: My hon. Friend will be aware that one difficulty in dealing with prisoners with mental illness is the shortage of psychiatrists working in the prison medical service and the problem of getting transfers to psychiatric hospitals? What progress is being made on recruiting more people with psychiatric qualifications into the prison medical service? Has there been any progress on shortening the time for the transfer of prisoners to psychiatric hospitals?

William Cash: Will the Minister bear in mind my past remarks about the necessity for external audit if the internal Public Accounts Committees of the member states in question are not prepared to do the job properly?

Gareth Thomas: With your leave, Mr. Speaker, I shall reply briefly to one or two of the points that have been made. The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds) may now be aware that Government amendments and amendments from my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) are being tabled as we speak. I recognise that Members like to have early sight of Government amendments; nevertheless, all will want the Government to take time to get them right. I hope that Opposition Members—and, indeed, Government Members—will appreciate the amendments that are being tabled.
	The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness asked about the distribution of expenditure and whether some will be front-loaded. Some investment in new systems will indeed be required, so some front-loading will be necessary. He also asked why a three-year period is specified, given that it will take seven years to reach the 0.7 per cent. target. The three-year period relates to the comprehensive spending review period. We will not necessarily be able to speed up progress toward the 0.7 per cent. target; it would take the international finance facility to do that. If the hon. Gentleman is aware of any leakage, I hope that he will inform us of it, so that we can take action to correct it. I can reassure him that I foresee no scenario in which we will have to withdraw the money resolution.
	The hon. Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) asked whether Government time and other assistance might be needed to speed up the Bill's passage. Given that it has the support of Front Benchers in all parts of the House, there should be no circumstances in which Government time is needed to progress the Bill. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could seek reassurance from the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) that he agrees with that assessment.
	The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst asked for more information on the distribution of costs. The regulatory impact assessment was, I believe, made available in the Library last year, and it provides some clarity on how the costs are set out.
	Question put and agreed to.

William Cash: The Minister refers to building blocks in respect of the inner parts of the Bill. He might recall that, in addressing my remarks to the Home Secretary on Second Reading, I demonstrated the relationship between the Bill, what the Information Commissioner had to say and what I thought George Orwell would have made of the provisions on the building blocks of compulsion. I do not see any change in substance or principle. Does the Minister accept that the buildings blocks are those of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth?

Edward Garnier: May I draw the House's attention to the fact that humble pie is also evident in this group of amendments? I was delighted to see the Minister eating it, although it is pity that he did not eat it in the summer, when we had our interesting discussions during the Committee stage.
	We had a lengthy debate about this very issue and at that stage the Government decided that they were prepared to introduce compulsion through secondary legislation. I see my hon. Friends the Members for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) and for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace), who were on the Committee with me, in their places today. We drew the issue to the Committee's attention but the Government, in their wisdom, decided that they knew best and that if they wanted to bring in compulsion—which was clearly their end intention—they would do it through secondary legislation.
	The problem facing the Government is that they have, as usual, misused the English language. When they say "voluntary", they mean "compulsory", and that is why they have got stuck. When they say "may", they mean "must" and when they say "possibly", they mean "definitely". That is why they were given a thorough ticking-off in the other place, where Members of the House of Lords—not only from the opposition parties, but from the Government party—turned up in numbers to persuade them that their original thinking was wrong.
	I am delighted that the Minister and the Home Secretary have changed their mind. They were sensible to do so and here we are, dealing with something of a concession. However, before we get overexcited, we need to be clear about the value of the concession—how limited or extensive it is. We shall come on to designated documents in the next group of amendments, but we have already discovered from my intervention that a compulsory procedure will still be required when they are applied for. That is to say that when people apply for their passport, a residential status document or an immigration document they will still be compelled, whether they like it or not, under this Christmas tree of a Bill—which allows the Secretary of State to take unto himself 61 powers to make further law—to do things that he requires them to do. It is only in the discrete area of clauses 6 and 7 that the requirement for primary legislation bites. We are grateful for that—let me not give the Home Secretary and the Minister of State any other impression—but the problem remains that compulsion is still a big part of the Bill, which is still no more than a Christmas tree, providing various little places for this Secretary of State or his successors to add on secondary legislation giving them powers to tell us what to do.

Edward Garnier: But it is a tiny number compared to the 48 million or so who will be required through compulsion, in designated documents, to enter on to the national identity register material that is private to them.

John Denham: I shall endeavour to restrict myself to the particular topics under discussion, although the temptation to enter into another Second Reading debate is rather large. This is a debate dominated by a high degree of irrationality, as the exchanges in the past five minutes have shown. The inability to distinguish between a system in which a private company can check the validity of an individual's identity card and access to the register, with all that that implies about access to the data, has bedevilled this really important project.
	I want both the ID card scheme and the register to succeed, because if we do not start to tackle the problems now, whether they be identity fraud for commercial reasons, how to protect the employment rights of low-paid people whose jobs are being undercut by illegal labour or the use of identity fraud for terrorism—all of them issues that make the case for ID cards—they will be greater in 10 years' time. Therefore, we need to make a success of the project now.
	I welcome what the Government have done. As my hon. Friend the Minister made clear, the change was proposed originally by the Select Committee nearly two years ago, and I would not be a Select Committee Chair if I did not point out that sometimes it would be nice if our reports were acted on when they were first written, not a couple of years later when it becomes convenient to do so.
	We were right to talk about new parliamentary legislation for two reasons. The term "compulsory", which I hope I will come back to on the next set of amendments, is being used in different ways in this debate. It is perfectly clear that in the first phase of establishing the national identity register, those who wish to have a passport, for example, if it is a designated document, will have to go on to the national identity register. However, leaving aside the issues of principle, at least in that process the individual is making use of a service that is of benefit to them, namely, getting hold of a passport. It is reasonable to assume that there will be a powerful driver for any Government to ensure that that process is convenient, effective and works quickly. We saw a few years ago how quickly the public respond if something goes wrong in an agency such as the Passport and Records Agency.
	The second phase of the process is entirely different, because that will require individuals to register and go through a process of registering their biometrics, and so forth, for which they get nothing back immediately—for example, in the form of a passport. Getting that phase right and being sure that the system is designed to make the process as user-friendly as possible is critical. When we considered the Bill two years ago, we could not look eight years into the future and know the design of the process. It is right for Parliament to say that it wants not only a yes-no super-affirmative vote, but fresh legislation and an explanation from the Government of the day of how that part of the process, which is frankly much more difficult, will be handled.

John Denham: No; the process is a good deal less complex than that of the CSA, which faces intrinsic problems such as income assessment and deduction of earnings—I am sure that hon. Members do not want us to get into a detailed debate about that topic. Although the process must be repeated for millions of people, the inherent issues in national identity registration are simpler than those in the projects that have gone wrong.
	The Select Committee was right to press for separate legislation from the outset, because however well the Bill is scrutinised by us and the House of Lords, it is doubtful whether it will be perfect in six or seven years' time. Even if this were not a Home Office Bill, it would inevitably require a certain amount of amendment, clarification and adjustment in due course. It would be ridiculous to update this Bill and have a separate super-affirmative resolution on the question of extending it to the final 20 to 25 per cent. of the population.
	The change is sensible, because it means that on the crucial step of extending the provision to a group of people who are more difficult to reach, Parliament will be able to take an entirely fresh look at the project's strengths and weaknesses.

John Bercow: We have just heard the verdict of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) and his Committee, but does my hon. Friend recall that it was the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) who argued—as long as two years' ago—that, yes, compulsory ID cards would indeed change the relationship between the individual and the state, in the sense that they would allow him to overcome his sense of alienation and to assert his identity. I have met a lot of people in Buckingham who have grumbled about the loss of identity, but I have yet to hear any of them say that the problem would be addressed by a compulsory ID card from this Government.

William Cash: The real reason why the Government are including arrangements relating to biometric procedures is that they are based on a European directive, and the Government know that perfectly well. It is time that the House understood the extent to which domestic legislation is driven by European directives and regulations. The Home Secretary knows that that is why it is impossible to change the arrangements in the Bill. He has already signed up to do so. He has given it away in principle and in practice.

William Cash: I am grateful for that intervention, but I thought that the hon. Gentleman was about to refer to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) on this matter. The plain fact remains that whether one considers the Tampere discussions or the Hague conventions or arrangements made at a summit in the Hague or in any other circumstances, the provisions in the Bill are inimical to the principles and liberties on which this country has been built. We do not have state control or a police state, but this Bill is the beginning of such arrangements. Ministers know that to be the case, although they are camouflaging it under a range of matters, including terrorism and state security. In essence, they are giving away the fundamental liberties of the people of this country and that is why we should oppose all the measures in this Bill.

Neil Gerrard: I shall be brief, so that other hon. Members have the chance to speak. I shall try to stick, as little of the debate has done, to the substance of the amendment. It deals with the simple issue of compulsion. I could go on at great length about the Bill, as I have in the past, but I want to point out that no other country is doing this. No other country is going down this road. I think that in a couple of years the whole issue will be abandoned. The idea that the Home Office, of all Departments, will get this massive infrastructure to work, which nobody else in the world has managed to do, is unreal.
	I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of the amendment, because it would not affect everybody. It affects those people who will not be caught under clause 5 of the Bill. The amendment will make a difference because primary legislation, with proper debate and scrutiny in this place, will be needed before a move to compulsion. I would much rather have that than secondary legislation. We should welcome the fact that this step has been taken; it is an improvement, although it does not deal with the aspects of the Bill that concern some people.
	I emphasise the point that I made in an intervention: the relationship between the amendment and clause 15, which covers the power to make public services conditional on identity checks. The Minister confirmed earlier that if the amendment is accepted clause 15 cannot come into effect without further primary legislation, and that is important.

Anne Main: Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that if it becomes compulsory to have an ID card to use the national health service, we shall be undermining the principle that the NHS is free at the point of use. People would have to pay to use it; without the card they would be unable to access services that we have always understood are free at the point of use.

Robert Smith: Is not the logic of the Home Secretary's argument that, because the cost would shared by fewer people, there is therefore less desire for ID cards in the country than he suspects? Would it not make more sense to accept the Lords amendments and respect the rights of individuals to choose how quickly the scheme is rolled out and whether they will take part in it, and thereby make it truly voluntary?

Charles Clarke: We believe that there is no problem of that type at all. The immigration documents that we are describing are of people coming here on the basis of having to indicate their identity to gain residence permits. That is not only reasonable, as would be clear to anybody, but entirely works with the European convention on human rights and is compliant with it.

Robert Wareing: To pursue the question asked by the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone) about access by foreign countries to the register, what concerns me most about the Bill and the database is the issue of who will have access to it and who will give approval for that access? Is it possible for the intelligence services of a foreign country, such as the USA, ever to have access to the database?

Adrian Bailey: I have been listening to the right hon. Gentleman's argument and he makes the point about the alleged unreliability of Home Office IT projects. Would he not agree that in fact the process being outlined for what is effectively an evolutionary process for putting data on a database is the proper and valid way to proceed in order to ensure that all procedures are tried and tested before we have the debate on compulsory registration, and that these processes can inform that debate? Should he not therefore be supporting the Government?

David Blunkett: Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the whole purpose of having a clean identity base is to ensure that once someone's identity has been verified by taking the biometric, that biometric can then never be used by anyone else. If someone takes someone's identity to begin with, they would have to continue with that identity for the rest of their lives. Therefore, the purpose of a clean identity base nationally is to achieve what the Conservative party paraded as its policy before the election, namely, an understanding of who is in the country, who is entitled to work, who is entitled to services and to ensure that those who are not, are precluded from working, drawing down on free services or being involved in other such ventures. Is that not the case?

Martin Linton: As my hon. Friend knows, we have only four minutes left in this debate, and I have not intervened on others.
	A voluntary ID register makes no more sense than voluntary bus fares or voluntary juries. The huge benefits that will come to the citizen, to the Government and to private industry with the introduction of ID cards are to a large extent dependent on it being compulsory for everyone's name to be on the national identity register. The figures in the Home Office benefits overview show that we could draw benefits worth £1.1 billion from the existence of such a register, but that we would draw 100 per cent. of those benefits only if we had 100 per cent. take-up. With only 50 per cent. take-up, the benefits would be less than 10 per cent. of that figure. This is precisely the point that the amendment does not deal with. With a take-up of only 60 per cent., the benefits would be less than 20 per cent. Only when we pass the 80 to 90 per cent. take-up rate will the benefits of this legislation really come to us.
	The lion's share of the benefits, in financial terms, will come from fraud prevention and the reduced cost of crime. Only a small benefit will come, in the earlier stages, from the greater efficiency of public services and from more effective control of work permits and visas. If we had a low take-up, we would see significant benefits only in public services and in immigration, although the savings would still be well worth having to organisations such as the Criminal Records Bureau, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the Department for Education and Skills and the immigration and nationality directorate.
	To reduce fraud, however, we need everyone to be in the scheme. As long as we are allowed to present alternative forms of identification, such as utility bills, the people who intend to commit fraud will do just that. It is ironic that hon. Members who were concerned about the weakness of List 99 and the sex offenders register should have missed the point that those weaknesses are in large part due to the lack of any way of being sure of someone's identity. The Criminal Records Bureau has estimated that the time needed to carry out a check would come down from four weeks to three days if we had ID cards. More importantly, the result of that check would be much more secure.
	The other point that we have missed is that the largest beneficiary of a full ID card system would be not the Government but the citizen. When someone has their identity stolen, they do not usually lose out financially. It is the bank that loses, and passes the cost on to other users. According to the Home Office, the benefit of ID cards would amount to about £420 billion for the citizen, and a similar amount to industry, but only about £240 million to public services. We have only to consider the costs and benefits of the ID card system to see that—

Andy Burnham: I beg to move, That the House disagrees with the Lords in the said amendment.

Andy Burnham: I have two points to make in response. First, it is not a case of either/or. He will know—the point has been made many times—that this Government have invested significantly in police on the beat and we are proud to have done so. The hon. Gentleman's main point—and a mistake made by the Opposition throughout the debate—is the suggestion that a pot of funds is sitting in the Home Office to pay for the entire scheme and that it can easily be directed to another Home Office priority. The whole premise is that the basis of funding the scheme will be the same as for passports: the costs of running the passport service are predominantly recovered from the fees people pay for their passport. That principle will continue when we introduce a biometric ID card system.

Edward Garnier: May I draw Members' attention to the Minister's letter of 7 February, which was sent only to Labour Members? In attacking the London School of Economics' report on the costs of the project, he said:
	"The LSE also allocated an inflated £1 billion marketing budget and assumed a much higher loss/ theft rate than is the case for existing documents."
	Was not the Minister aware when he wrote the letter that the Government had received a denial of that point on 5 August 2005 when the LSE responded to the Government response to the LSE report? Surely he was aware that the LSE status report issued in January 2006 stated that it had made no such estimate. Would he care to correct that erroneous allegation, which continues the line of ad hominem attacks that he and his colleagues have made on Simon Davies and his colleagues?

Andy Burnham: I do share that confidence. Let me develop the point that I made in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Glenda Jackson). It is not correct to say glibly that the scheme is directly comparable to the Child Support Agency. They are not analogous, and we are describing a very different function. Before hon. Members run away with the idea that the scheme is intended to encompass everything, let me say that it is a basic identification scheme that will hold biometric details.
	Let me refer the House to the experience of the United States since 11 September. The US has introduced biometrics into their immigration system pretty much from a standing start, and they are now used for all visas around the world and for people going through US Customs control. Such schemes are workable. They are in use today. The British Government are increasingly using biometrics. We have progressively introduced biometrics into visas, and that process is beginning to be implemented around the world. A biometric is being used in applicant registration cards for asylum seekers, and we are seeking to build on such relevant experience.

Edward Garnier: If I have not reset the Minister's mind, I sincerely hope that the hon. Lady has done so, but I am not at all confident that either of us will have succeeded.
	I support Lords amendment No. 70 and want to address amendment (a) in lieu, which the Government intend to support, tabled by the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) made the eminently sensible point, which came straight out of Lords amendment No. 70, that it requires a detailed estimate not just of the revenue and capital costs, but of the expected benefits. He is right to say that a clause without proposed subsection (2)(b) would not be much shorter than one with it. However, it seems that the policy behind Lords amendment No. 70 is much more rigorous and candid, and it would produce a much more sensible and open understanding of the Government's financial estimates and expectations, than the amendment drafted by the right hon. Gentleman. There is nothing in Lords amendment No. 70 of which the Government should have any fear. Indeed, they have half sold the pass, in one sense, by agreeing to support the amendment.
	The Government say that the annual running costs are broadly £584 million. Multiply that by 10 and we get the £5.84 billion that people have talked about. For one year, starting in late 2008, the figure would be £5.84 million. The LSE report, which came out last June, put the figures over a 10 year period in a range of £10.6 billion to £19.2 billion. If the Home Office's annual figure of £5.84 million is representative of costs over 10 years, we get a total of £5.8 billion. The Government say that the fee will be £93 for a passport and £30 for an identity card, and they imply that the fees are driven from the £584 million cost estimate.
	So far so good, but if the LSE report is right, the fee for a passport could be between £170 and more than £300, and the cost of an ID card could rise to more than £100. As I understand it, the Government have refused—they may have changed their mind today—to cap fees. The implication is that if costs rise, so too will fees. There is plenty of research to show that the acceptability of the ID scheme declines as its costs increase. The opinion polls started off by showing that people were greatly enthusiastic about the scheme, but that support steadily declined as the public came to realise that not only is it not going to assist in the several ways that the Government say it will, but that it will be increasingly expensive.
	The Home Office has produced some analysis in an attempted rebuttal of the LSE's figures, but the lines of attack have been about a few specific assumptions. There has not been an open and detailed debate between the LSE and the Home Office. That is a pity, to say the least.I understand that last summer the LSE found some areas on which it had overestimated costs, but also some areas in which it had underestimated costs. In the latest report, which it issued in the middle of January this year, it stands by its original estimates.
	Subject to the problem that the Home Office has in marshalling accounts of any sort, it cannot be beyond it to produce a report that contains a detailed estimate of the revenue and capital costs arising from the Bill, and it cannot be beyond it to produce a statement in the format of resource accounts, a statement of cash expenditure, and a statement setting out the material assumptions that were made in preparing the cost estimate. Nor can it be beyond the Home Office to provide the necessary subsidiary detail of the cost estimate, as set out in proposed subsection (4)(a), which states:
	"the actual costs incurred in the period from 26th April 2004",
	which is when the original Bill was published,
	"to the date to which the cost estimate is prepared",
	and in paragraph (b), which states:
	"the costs that are estimated to be incurred during a period of 10 years after the date to which the estimate is prepared"
	or such longer period as the Secretary of State may determine.
	All of those are things that accountants have to do all the time. They are all projects which, as the hon. Member for South Derbyshire said, are commissioned by business men and women in far smaller operations than the Home Office and, probably, in far bigger operations. It is not an unusual accounting exercise, and it is extraordinary that the Government are reluctant to undertake it.
	The Government say that there is a better idea in amendment (a), which the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras has tabled in lieu of the Lords amendments. I shall not cite the entire amendment save subsection (4), which is where the cogency of his argument falls to pieces:
	"If it appears to the Secretary of State that it would be prejudicial to securing the best value from the use of public money to publish any matter by including it in his next report under this section, he may exclude that matter from that report."
	The amendment leads us down a path of wonderful expectation—at last, a new Labour Government are going to be candid about their extraordinary project on identity cards and the national identity register—only to hand over to the Secretary of State the subjective ability to pull the report if he does not find it convenient. I urge the House not to be mollycoddled into thinking that the preceding provisions will ever be delivered if subsection (4) remains part of the right hon. Gentleman's amendment.
	Even if the subject is dull and uninteresting, this is an important area of debate. The supply of Government money from public funds—from our constituents' pockets—should be controlled by the House, and the Government should make clear to the House what they intend to do with our constituents' money. They have never provided us with sensible estimates of the capital or revenue costs, still less the benefits, as the hon. Member for Walthamstow implied. Now that the Government are on the retreat on compulsion under clauses 6 and 7, it is time that they went a little further and condescended to do justice not only to the House but to the wider public by providing them with access to their thinking and their methodology on those huge costs. Whether they are £5.8 billion or £20 billion over 10 years, the principle remains the same. We are entitled to know—we have a duty to know—and the Government have an obligation to disgorge that information.

Alistair Carmichael: That must have been a good 30 seconds out of the first 36 minutes. It was his own hon. Friend, the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard), who made the point at almost 8 o'clock that he had not yet addressed the issue. We will be able to check the record tomorrow.
	In any event, the complexity of the debate rather masks the simplicity of the issues at stake here. The point to be made here is not greatly dissimilar to that which we made in relation to compulsion, namely that if identity cards were as good as was claimed, why was compulsion necessary. If the Government's plans are as well costed and as affordable as they would have us believe, they should have nothing to fear from Lords amendment No. 70.
	Whether one takes the LSE report or the KPMG report, or whatever basis one wishes to proceed on, the basic truth of the matter is that no one really knows what the cost of identity cards will be. That is possibly why the Government prefer the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras to Lords amendment No. 70.
	We all know that the acceptability of ID cards to the general public declines as cost increases. The Minister has said that he would not pay £300 for an ID card—that may yet prove to be a hostage to fortune—which is not a point of principle, but an entirely pragmatic point relating to cost. Although he will undoubtedly have moved on to greater and higher things in government, I wonder what his position will be when and if the cost hits £300.
	The Minister has also told us that the model for financing ID cards follows that of the UK Passport Service, so it is clear that the cost will impact directly on the individual rather than its coming from the Government. Earlier, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) used the expression "plastic poll tax", which is exceptionally apposite.
	The hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie) has referred to the Government estimate that the cost of identity fraud and identity theft is in the region of £1.7 billion. However, that figure includes fraud associated with credit and debit cards, the bulk of which takes place online. The introduction of an identity card will make no difference to the incidence of such fraud, because biometrics are useless in relation to online transactions.
	The Minister has mentioned the UK Passport Service, but the parallel is not valid, because it does not rely on the database or the register. Furthermore, the UK Passport Service does not require the installation of a reader in every public service office, which will include every benefits office, hospital and GP surgery in England and Wales—the Scottish Executive have more sense than to install such machines. Those costs, which will be significant, make quantification even more difficult.
	The Minister has said that Lords amendment No. 70 is unprecedented and novel, and he is absolutely right. He has also said that it is outrageous that the Government should have to explain the cost of the measure before they implement it, because this is a manifesto Bill. If that is outrageous, the cost should have been in the manifesto to allow people to form a judgment at the polls—in that regard, we have seen the worst of Labour party manifestos in the past few weeks. The protection of the taxpayer, which is entirely unprecedented, is appropriate, because the whole Bill is entirely unprecedented. The Bill seeks to rewrite the relationship between the citizen and the state as we have always understood it in this country. If the Government want to take that course, the least they can do is tell us the cost of that step before they take it.
	Lords amendment No. 70 is clear. Subsection (2) specifies that the report should contain a detailed estimate of the revenue and capital costs and that a statement of expected benefits should be produced. Subsection (3) covers the extent of the cost estimates.

Lynne Jones: I welcome the Government's agreement with amendment (a). However, my problem is that large amounts of public money will be spent before we reach the inevitable point at which we have to call a halt to the terrible monster. I am more sceptical than my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) about the Government's figures. Their precision is incredible—£584 million, not £583 million or £585 million. At least the London School of Economics gave a range of estimates. The Under-Secretary did not make it clear in reply to my interventions whether the figure included set-up costs.
	However, we have information about current expenditure from the United Kingdom Passport Service website. I also obtained information through parliamentary questions and from letters from the Under-Secretary. We therefore know that the cost of running the old-style passports was £219 million in 2004–05 and that the charge to people who wanted a passport was £35.60. This year, we commence the introduction of biometric passports, which will include only the facial biometric—a digital image. Yet it will cost the Government £397 million a year and people who purchase the passports will have to pay at least £57.93, which, according to the Government, is the cost of producing the passports.
	In getting from old-style passports to the first phase of the biometric passport, which includes only one image, the running costs will increase by £178 million a year. Those figures are probably reliable. However, the jump from the new passport with one digital biometric to the all-singing, all-dancing biometric passport/ID card system database is supposed to entail an increase of a mere £187 million. I cannot believe those figures. I cannot believe that it costs £178 million a year to get from A to B yet it will cost only £187 million a year to get from B to C. That does not include the £93 that will have to paid. Apparently, 70 per cent. of it is attributable to the passport, working out at approximately £65 for the passport element.I cannot believe that a passport that contains two fingerprint biometrics as well as the facial biometric will be so cheap, given that the Government have already said that the cost will exceed £57.93. Furthermore, the £93 that people will pay for the privilege or otherwise of having their details on the national identity register and being forced to have an identity card will not cover the cost of operating and maintaining the verification services. We have had no breakdown of how much of the £584 million that would account for; it is an additional cost.
	I am cynical about Government computer systems. I recently served on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which conducted a brief inquiry into the Rural Payments Agency's computer records system. The initial cost of that system was going to be £37.4 million a year, to cover capital and revenue costs. That figure has now risen to £54.3 million—an increase of 50 per cent. If a database of only 100,000 records is costing £50-odd million a year to run, it does not seem sensible that we are going to have to pay only an extra £187 million a year to run a massive database of 100 million records, which will be interrogated and will have an audit trail—never mind the cost of the security.
	What really frightens me about this scheme is that it will make me feel less secure, rather than more secure. The biometrics will have radio frequency identity chips on them, and people will have a field day intercepting them. So what security are we going to put on to the cards? In America, the biometric passports—which also have just the facial biometric—have radio frequency identity chips so that they can be read without contact. There was a furore there when people realised that anyone could intercept that identity information, and an agreement to allow the scheme to go ahead was reached only because a shield was provided in the cover of each passport to stop the signals being intercepted other than when the cover was opened for the passport to be verified at border controls or for Government purposes.
	The figures simply do not stack up. They do not compare in any way with the costs of other computer systems, and the proposed system is far more complex than any other that we have seen anywhere in the world. Earlier, the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee quoted from his Committee's report. I should also like to do so. Paragraph 64 on page 23 states:
	"The proposed system is unprecedentedly large and complex. It will contain sensitive personal information on tens of millions of individuals. Any failure will significantly affect the functioning of public and private services and personal and national security. Measures to ensure the integrity of the design, implementation and operation of the system must be built in to every aspect of its development . . . We will make recommendations for addressing this serious weakness later in the report."
	The Committee went on to do so. It had been
	"concerned about the closed nature of the procurement process",
	and stated that it was essential the process be open. It went on:
	"Any potential gains from competing providers providing innovative design solutions are likely to be more than offset by the unanticipated problems that will arise from designs that have not been subject to technical and peer scrutiny."

Mark Todd: I shall try to focus on the amendments. I have quite a lot of sympathy for the Lords amendment, although in many respects it is not perfect, so I shall not endorse it. Nor shall I endorse the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson), for reasons that I shall give in a moment.
	The Lords amendments is rather too narrowly written. I tabled a new clause on Report that attempted to set out the kind of things that I would expect the Government to produce before they authorised substantial expenditure on such a project. Unfortunately, that new clause was not selected, but it focused first on the fact that the Secretary of State ought to set out properly the reasons for such a proposal. We have seen a number of documents so far that, frankly, make limited reading indeed in explaining why the proposal is a good idea, why it will produce the sort of benefits that have been vaguely referred to and why we should endorse it. I do not share some colleagues' views that the Bill is a terrible threat to civil liberties. I have never thought that. My instinct is that it might be a terrible threat to our public purse. That has been the focus of my concern throughout.
	Secondly, I would expect the costs and benefits to be set out in reasonable terms. This is not the time at which one could certainly demonstrate the cost with any authority. As I have remarked in my interventions, frankly, the LSE proposals are based on its own concept of how an ID card system might work. They may be valuable in those terms, but they have no authority since they bear no relationship to what the Government may be attempting to do.
	The Government have set out their ideas in such vague terms that, frankly, it would be impossible for a professional contractor to produce anything other than fairly speculative estimates of how much those ideas might cost. That is why I have remarked on the KPMG report. I do not know how much was spent on it, but to be honest, it will do what most consultants will wisely do: it will cover their bases very carefully and certainly not end up by giving a great deal of authority to a figure that most professionals would say could only be speculative at this time. I suspect that, if the full report were made available, one would probably see those caveats written in rather larger type than in the summary. I would expect the costs and benefits to be produced, but when procurement was about to proceed. That was the point of the new clause that I tabled on Report.
	Thirdly, I would want the assumptions behind any savings to be properly set out. I intervened on my hon. Friend the Minister about the buy-in of other stakeholders in the project. I referred particularly to the private sector, but I could equally have touched on the role of other Departments. Even given the rather vague business case that has been produced to date, the private sector obviously has an important role to play. It is understood that the project may be crucial in reducing fraud in our financial system. If so, one might expect that many of our financial institutions would be putting up their hands now, saying "We wholeheartedly endorse this project, and we wish to see it proceed as fast as possible."
	I drew my hon. Friend the Minister's attention to the fact that those statements of faith have, as yet, not been made. When I questioned officials and IT professionals, they gave a rather sunny and optimistic reason for that and suggested that people were waiting for the Bill to be passed and would then dive in very quickly. They genuinely do not know whether they are buying a pig in a poke, exactly what the project involves and what meaning it may have for their businesses. For that reason, they are most unlikely to put a buy-in together. I would expect the stakeholders—whether private sector partners or those in other aspects of government, such as the agencies and Departments, which must clearly play a part—to make a much more coherent statement of the benefits when procurement is about to proceed.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) referred to the Department of Health, and that is a very good example. We would expect it to participate in the scheme, but I doubt whether it has even the vaguest idea of how the scheme might apply to what it does.Much of the information will be required at some stage in the future. I do not expect the documents that the Government have produced so far to refer to it in detail, but I would expect there to be a point at which we have an opportunity to review the details before further substantial sums of public money are committed.
	I also want a much more rigorous examination of the risks in the project—one or two of them have been touched on in the debate—and how they are likely to be mitigated. Risk mitigation means cost. Dealing with perceived events and working out their likelihood of threatening a project of this kind require steps to improve its security. Such steps may deal only with a one-in-a-million circumstance but, in a project as central as this, a one-in-a-million circumstance may well be what we have to deal with.
	I often remark that our tolerance of error rates for people flying airlines or performing complex surgery is much lower than it would be for someone performing a less critical function. We expect people carrying out high-risk functions to take steps to reduce the risks either through the intervention of technology or additional human support. Those certainly cost money. I am not clear how the risks have been analysed and how costs have been applied to reducing those risks.
	I have described the points that I would like to have seen covered but, unfortunately, the Lords amendment is rather more narrowly drawn. If they choose to consider what happens tonight, they may want to reflect on that should they return the issue to us.
	I have already referred to the importance of transparency for all our benefit in the project. A number of reports have been pulled together by agencies outside and inside government to assist us in judging whether it is the right thing to do. We have had the KPMG report. Although I would not want to read it in considerable detail, its full publication would have been helpful to us at this time. The Office of Government Commerce gateway process that the project will go through on a number of occasions at various points in its life also provides a useful indication of risk. One of its major focuses is to say what risks have been anticipated in the running of the project and how we might deal with them. From the little glimpse that some civil servants kindly gave me the last time the process was carried out, it is not surprising that it is regarded as extremely high risk with a number of flashing amber lights indicating that steps need to be taken to deal with possible failure in the future. That would not surprise anyone, but it would be useful to have the risks more clearly defined so that we can understand them and can start to put money towards dealing with them.
	I also wish to refer to the concept viability report that the industry has been asked to produce. I believe that it has actually been produced and the Minister told me earlier that it would be published at the procurement point. I would rather see it now, so that I can understand the industry's reaction. Those in the industry that I have spoken to have broadly said that most of them would love to take part in such a project because it looks like serious stacks of money are involved.

Mark Todd: Whatever the figure is. The right hon. Gentleman has not been present for this debate, but he will know that I have cast doubt on all the estimates that have been made. That is one of them.
	People in the industry are keen, but I think that they share my concern at the rather muddled presentation and the possibility that it will lead to a complex and poor quality specification that will not necessarily get the buy-in of all the critical players. That is at the root of failed IT projects. I shall not go down the route taken by my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras who chose to cast a great deal of blame on IT companies. Of course, they fail and do things wrong. However, the critical thing that normally goes wrong in such projects happens right at the start. It is necessary to get the specification of what is being done absolutely straight before driving the project through with narrow-minded rigour. A critical test is thus the quality of project management, which would indicate whether costs could be managed effectively. However, although I have met one or two of the people involved in the project, I have seen no evidence to date of the rigorous project management disciplines that would be required to deliver a project that was a tenth as difficult as the identity card scheme will be.
	For the reasons that I have outlined, I take no great comfort from the debate. I have given all these pieces of advice in private, so it is a little sad to find that little progress appears to have been made. I am surprised that the Government have chosen to support the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras because while I accept the caveats that have been cited about the possibility of evading various responsibilities due to the amendment, the provision will give rise to a process of terrible Chinese water torture because some poor Minister will have to produce a report every six months. The Minister might well say, "I can't reveal them this and can't tell them that," but the reports will prompt ongoing repetitive debate on the merits and purpose of the scheme. I am not worried about that, but I am puzzled by the Government's insistence on taking that route to reassure people about the project, rather than the route that I would have commended, which would be a more rigorous attempt to nail things down right at the start. That remains my preferred strategy, so I still hope that the Government will adopt it. I am sad that I will not be able to give the Government my support on these matters tonight.